JC updated his plan on Shacknews and what he wrote made me think a little.
Actually he was coding Radeon 8500 support for DOOM 3 and it seems he became a driver bug hunter for ATI but as Carmack said: "(...) but ATI got me fixes rapidly, and we soon had everything working properly." Well that exactly is what the community would like to see. He also gives some comments on Radeon 8500 performance as well as a possible hardware bug! On the other hand he also comments on GeForce 4 products. Read more...
Excerpts about Radeon 8500 performance: The vertex program extensions provide almost the same functionality. The ATI hardware is a little bit more capable, but not in any way that I care about. The fragment level processing is clearly way better on the 8500 than on the Nvidia products, including the latest GF4. You have six individual textures, but you can access the textures twice, giving up to eleven possible texture accesses in a single pass, and the dependent texture operation is much more sensible. A test of light interaction speed initially had the 8500 significantly slower than the GF3, which was shocking due to the difference in pass count. ATI identified some driver issues, and the speed came around so that the 8500 was faster in all combinations of texture attributes, in some cases 30+% more. The Hardware Bug? A high polygon count scene that was more representative of real game graphics under heavy load gave a surprising result. I was expecting ATI to clobber Nvidia here due to the much lower triangle count and MUCH lower state change functional overhead from the single pass interaction rendering, but they came out slower. ATI has identified an issue that is likely causing the unexpected performance, but it may not be something that can be worked around on current hardware. The GeForce 4 Debate: On the topic of current Nvidia cards: Do not buy a GeForce4-MX for Doom. Nvidia has really made a mess of the naming conventions here. I always thought it was bad enough that GF2 was just a speed bumped GF1, while GF3 had significant architectural improvements over GF2. I expected GF4 to be the speed bumped GF3, but calling the NV17 GF4-MX really sucks. GF4-MX will still run Doom properly, but it will be using the NV10 codepath with only two texture units and no vertex shaders. A GF3 or 8500 will be much better performers. The GF4-MX may still be the card of choice for many people depending on pricing, especially considering that many games won't use four textures and vertex programs, but damn, I wish they had named it something else. As usual, there will be better cards available from both Nvidia and ATI by the time we ship the game. Check out the full .plan here. I guess when you read between the lines that ATI has great support from game developers which are apparently more capable of identifying driver bugs than ATI devs themselves. Afterall I would imagine though that if all these bugs are fixed we may get a killer official driver from ATI. And maybe we're lucky so the "High Poly bug" does not prove to be in hardware. I also would like to hear an ATI statement first to say that this is REALLY a hardware issue.
Actually he was coding Radeon 8500 support for DOOM 3 and it seems he became a driver bug hunter for ATI but as Carmack said: "(...) but ATI got me fixes rapidly, and we soon had everything working properly." Well that exactly is what the community would like to see. He also gives some comments on Radeon 8500 performance as well as a possible hardware bug! On the other hand he also comments on GeForce 4 products. Read more...
Excerpts about Radeon 8500 performance: The vertex program extensions provide almost the same functionality. The ATI hardware is a little bit more capable, but not in any way that I care about. The fragment level processing is clearly way better on the 8500 than on the Nvidia products, including the latest GF4. You have six individual textures, but you can access the textures twice, giving up to eleven possible texture accesses in a single pass, and the dependent texture operation is much more sensible. A test of light interaction speed initially had the 8500 significantly slower than the GF3, which was shocking due to the difference in pass count. ATI identified some driver issues, and the speed came around so that the 8500 was faster in all combinations of texture attributes, in some cases 30+% more. The Hardware Bug? A high polygon count scene that was more representative of real game graphics under heavy load gave a surprising result. I was expecting ATI to clobber Nvidia here due to the much lower triangle count and MUCH lower state change functional overhead from the single pass interaction rendering, but they came out slower. ATI has identified an issue that is likely causing the unexpected performance, but it may not be something that can be worked around on current hardware. The GeForce 4 Debate: On the topic of current Nvidia cards: Do not buy a GeForce4-MX for Doom. Nvidia has really made a mess of the naming conventions here. I always thought it was bad enough that GF2 was just a speed bumped GF1, while GF3 had significant architectural improvements over GF2. I expected GF4 to be the speed bumped GF3, but calling the NV17 GF4-MX really sucks. GF4-MX will still run Doom properly, but it will be using the NV10 codepath with only two texture units and no vertex shaders. A GF3 or 8500 will be much better performers. The GF4-MX may still be the card of choice for many people depending on pricing, especially considering that many games won't use four textures and vertex programs, but damn, I wish they had named it something else. As usual, there will be better cards available from both Nvidia and ATI by the time we ship the game. Check out the full .plan here. I guess when you read between the lines that ATI has great support from game developers which are apparently more capable of identifying driver bugs than ATI devs themselves. Afterall I would imagine though that if all these bugs are fixed we may get a killer official driver from ATI. And maybe we're lucky so the "High Poly bug" does not prove to be in hardware. I also would like to hear an ATI statement first to say that this is REALLY a hardware issue.
